Log cabin dream home - smack dab in suburbia

KNOCK ON ANY DOOR - Random stories of Central Florida residents

March 16, 2008|By Jeff Kunerth, Sentinel Staff Writer

The log cabin house cost more and took longer to build than Roy Dowling expected.

It was hard finding insurance companies willing to write a policy for an all-wood house. Hard to find people who knew how to build log cabins in Florida. Hard to get financing for the kind of house nobody else had who wasn't living in the mountains of North Carolina.

But at long last, after all that waiting and all that money, Roy, his wife and their son moved into the log house across the street from Bear Lake in Seminole County.

That's when they started getting sick.

Their eyes watered, their throats constricted, their skin itched. Watching his wife and son cough, scratch and sneeze, a thought came into Roy Dowling's head: "I built a house my family is allergic to."

It was a big, beautiful, toxic house. That night they were supposed to move in, Roy's wife and son slept in the van parked outside the log cabin. The next day, Roy called the builder.

Oops, the builder said.

There are two kinds of linseed oil sealant applied to cedar log homes -- one for the outside and one for the inside. The workers who finished off Roy's house mistakenly applied the stronger, outside sealant to the inside of the house.

Just wait for the wood to finish soaking up the oil and the fumes to disappear, the builder said.

Ten days later, Roy and Susan Dowling moved back in to their dream house.

At night, through the trees filters a warm amber glow from the inside of the house that makes the whole thing look like a Thomas Kinkade painting.

In the front of the house is a two-story living room with an elk head hung above a wide-screen TV. The inside is decorated with Roy's toy trains, collection of Franklin Mint toy tractors, Susan's antiques and her country-style dM-icor.

Outside is the manure wagon. And the covered wagon. And the corn wagon. And the wood plow and other old farm implements that adorn the front lawn of their three-quarter-acre lot.

"I have to be a little bit different and nobody else has a manure wagon," Roy says.

Susan Dowling is a tolerant woman. She has a kindly face and a tactful way of disagreeing with her husband without being disagreeable. It's Susan who weeds around Roy's lawn ornaments.

"I don't mind the wagons. They go along with the log cabin," says Susan, 62. "I don't like the heavy equipment. I don't want it to look junky."

"I wish this was on 20 acres," says Roy, 63, who owns a print shop. "I'd have a lot more wagons."

"Oh, God," Susan sighs.

Sue and Roy have been married for 32 years. They met in Hyde Park, N.Y., where Roy's parents owned a series of small businesses including a hotel.

Like his father, Roy is a small-business owner. He owned several print shops when he bought the land in 1991 to build his log house.

But Roy wanted more. From the minute he built his house, Roy Dowling also coveted the two empty lots behind his house. They belonged to a woman in Virginia who, with her husband, bought the parcels in 1957. Shortly after the purchase, her husband died.

Roy contacted the woman about buying her property. She said she had no intention of selling, but when she did, she would sell her land to Roy. He asked her to put that promise in writing. She declined.

So he sent her a check for the land. At the time, he was offering about what a low-end Winnebago costs today.

She sent it back.

The next year, he sent her another check. Same amount. Same result.

It became an annual ritual for Roy. Send a check, get it back. Send a check, get it back. Always the same amount, always the same reaction.

Until the day, 10 years later, when the old woman in Virginia said she was ready to sell. That was the end of their negotiations. She sold her property for the same amount Roy Dowling offered a decade earlier.

"To this day, it boggles me that the lady didn't ask me for more money," he says. "And I didn't raise it a dime."